The amount of data that describes map objects continues to expand. As any user of electronic mapping formats realizes, new features are routinely being added. Today electronic maps include a great deal of information about objects described by vector data. As many commercial electronic mapping implementations move from simpler raster-based map representations to object vector data, each object seemingly can be represented in a variety of views including illustrated views, satellite views, terrain views, street-level views, etc. Additionally, maps today include information about the specific object beyond its location including, where appropriate, contact information, traffic information, etc.
Such an increase in the volume of data describing map objects, i.e., map data, presents challenges in searching and serving map data to a high volume of users. Typically, the map data needs to be loaded into random access memory (RAM) and searched within RAM to provide reasonable response times. However, RAM is limited and it can be expensive, and accordingly, it is not practical to store all map data describing all map objects in the world on a single machine's RAM. Map data needs to be distributed across multiple machines RAM, but in such a way that all of the data required to service a request for map data is located on the same machine, at least for the majority of requests.